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Bitly Shoots Itself in the Foot and Eats its Own Toes

Bitly — formerly one of my favorite link shortening services — shot itself in the foot this week and ate its own toes in releasing an incredibly confounding and confused “update” to what was once a perennially pristine service that was dead nut simple to use.

Now, when you login to Bitly, you are presented with this horrible screen that talks about “Bitmarks” and other junk that makes no sense.  Where is my update box for Twitter and Facebook? All I want to is shorten my links with the Boles.co domain and have the update sent to Twitter and Facebook!  I can’t find a simple way to make those menial tasks happen any longer.

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CrashPlan Crashes and Burns

I have to say it takes a certain amount of guts to name your cloud computing backup service “CrashPlan” — because if your service doesn’t work, you’re going to get lots of snarky headlines like the one you see for this article.

Last night, at around 10:30pm, I downloaded and installed CrashPlan on my Mac and now, over 12 hours later, and after only having 1.1GB uploaded out of a 152GB total, I’ve given up on the service and I removed my content — I think, I hope! … there’s no way to actually preserve your privacy and delete your account or confirm actual machine deletion — and I wholly removed the CrashPlan software from my beloved MacBook Air.

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My 24" LED Apple Cinema Display is DEAD!

I thought Apple LED Cinema Displays were supposed to last forever.  Or, at least much longer than a measly 2.5 years.  Yes, I’m ticked.  My $1,000.00USD, 2.5-year-old, 24″ Apple Cinema display — previously lovingly reviewed here — went resistors up yesterday afternoon.  It’s dead, Jim.  Is this Cinema Display problem brewing to be the next Apple Time Capsule fiasco all over again?

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Why Paula Abdul on X-Factor is a Terrible Idea

The addition of Paula Abdul to the judging panel of American Factor X — Oops! I mean the “American X-Factor” — indicates a massive error in judgment.  Paula Abdul was intolerable on American Idol and her recent dance show was a mighty flop and the romanticized “chemistry” between Simon Cowell and Paula on Idol is made of nothing but string, sealing wax and Little Jackie Paper.

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Why The Daily Fails on the iPad

I haven’t always been sure about the benefits of the iPad as a computing platform, but I soon realized why the iPad is the future of learning and social interaction.  Rupert Murdoch’s — The Daily — appeared for the first time yesterday as the new “news standard” for entertainment on my iPad for a price of 99 cents a week or $40.00USD per year after an introductory two week free trial.  I am underwhelmed by The Daily and I don’t expect it to last very long, even though Murdoch says he spent $30 million on the effort.

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Cyndi Lauper's Failed Memphis Blues

We usually like Cyndi Lauper — except when her website is stealing from us — so we approached her new album, “Memphis Blues,” with both excitement and trepidation.  We were excited to see her join Tom Petty and Steve Miller in the release of new Blues albums over the last week; we were trepidatious because, in our experience, the best Blues albums come from those who are musicians first and singers second.

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Kevin Costner Helps through Action, Not Words

It’s all well and good when celebrities like Wycleff Jean try to make the world a better place by telling other people what to do. Talk is not just cheap, as some say — it is actually free. You can have all the brilliant notions you want and just go around telling people about them, but it won’t actually necessarily make anything happen.

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